The Real Iron Man Suit Almost Ready?

If you have dreamed of one day having a real Iron Man style suit to endow you with superhuman strength, the wait may not be too much longer.

We’ve seen lots of Iron Man style wannabees over the last few years, but the XOS 2 from Sarcos Raytheon looks like the closest thing to a real product so far.

This improved version of the original XOS is stronger, lighter, more damage resistant, and uses only half the power of its predecessor. It’s still tethered to an external power supply, which trades mobility for a lot more power and longer running time.

The good news is that Sarcos just announced that they expect to start shipping XOS 2 within about five years, and that an untethered version could be about 10 years out. Come to think of it, isn’t that what they said almost five years ago?

Obviously the military will be getting first dibs on the initial production, but eventually we should be able to get what would be the all time ultimate Halloween costume for ourselves.

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Massive Multi-Touch Star Wars Strategy Game

There have been some big Star Wars videogames, but none as big as Fleet Commander.

Arthur Nishimoto, a graduate student in the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Electronic Visualization Laboratory, has developed his real-time strategy game to be played on a wall-size LCD screen. Players are divided into two opposing teams that take control of X-wings, TIE fighters and even Death Stars, all with a touch of their fingers.

“The purpose of [Fleet Commander] was to explore how a complicated application like a real-time strategy game … could be played in a large, multitouch environment,” said Nishimoto in an e-mail to Wired.com. Read more

Terrafugia Transition can now drive you to the airport

For most experimental aircraft, earning an airworthiness certificate is enough of a challenge. But the Terrafugia Transition is a unique type of flying machine, requiring approval not only from the FAA, but also from the USDOT’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), since this air / land hybrid is likely to spend just as much time cruising down the highway as it will flying 5,000 feet above.

The Transition is now slightly closer to takeoff, with the NHTSA granting exemptions for absent airbags, a missing electronic stability system, and the plane’s lightweight polycarbonate windows (polycarbonate is lighter than automotive safety glass, and won’t shatter and obscure a pilot’s vision in the event of a bird strike).

Unfortunately the Transition still has other hurdles to fly over — its cabin is limited to carrying 330 pounds when fully fueled, including passengers, and the price has jumped 41 percent, to $250,000. In the meantime, Terrafugia hopes to move forward with production later this year, bringing the ‘flying car’ slightly closer to a runway (and highway) near you.

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DARPA’s XC2V FLYPMode Combat Vehicle

Okay, so perhaps the specific color here is up for debate, but one thing is clear: the XC2V FLYPMode is one imposing looking vehicle. Also known as the Experimental Crowd-derived Combat Support Vehicle, DARPA has billed this mean machine as the "first crowd-sourced, militarily relevant vehicle design."

After being selected as the winning entry to DARPA’s design-the-next-Humvee competition, Local Motors tricked out the XC2V FLYPMode in just 14 weeks. For now, it is but a "proof of principle project," meaning we probably won’t see this thing riding dirty in the desert anytime soon, if ever.

You can, however, see at least a portion of the beast’s birth in a time-lapse video after the break.

Continue reading DARPA’s XC2V FLYPMode crowd-sourced combat vehicle revealed, now in desert khaki (video)

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Sept. 24, 1960: USS Enterprise CVN-65 Is Launched

1960:  USS Enterprise, the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, is launched in Newport News, Virginia. CVN-65, nicknamed Big E, was the first carrier of its kind, powered solely by its eight nuclear reactors.

With nuclear power to propel it, the Enterprise does not need to carry its own fuel oil and has more room for aircraft and weapons. It routinely carries 70 to 90 planes. The ship measures in at 1,120 feet (about 100 feet longer than the USS Saratoga), with a 250-foot-wide flight deck and 93,970 tons displacement. It relies on a crew of 5,700.

All this came with a price: around $451.3 million (equivalent to $3.3 billion in today’s money), according to Jane’s American Fighting Ships of the 20th Century. The Enterprise came in well over budget and ended up being the only ship in its class. Five other planned ships were not constructed.

As for packing heat, the Enterprise is not lacking. These days, it stacks two NATO Sea Sparrow launchers (there were three, but one was removed,) two 20-mm Phalanx CIWS, or close-in weapon system, mounts and two RAM, or rolling-airframe missile, launchers. Aside from those, the Enterprise has a phased-array radar system, instead of the classic rotating dishes. This makes tracking multiple targets easier.

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Qualcomm To Release 1.5GHz Snapdragon CPU In 2011

Mobile device chipmaker Qualcomm will launch a more powerful mobile processor in Q1 2011. The upcoming 1.5GHz Snapdragon CPU will offer a 50% jump in processor speed over today’s 1GHz smartphone processors.

The new processor will provide high-quality multimedia performance with 3D graphics, HD video, built-in GPS and more. A 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon will also help Android regain an edge in the high-end against Apple’s iPhone 4, which is now on par or ahead of most Android devices with its custom-designed but single-core A4 chip. Watch the video after the jump to get more details.

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Windows Phone 7 And The Accelerometer

"When Windows Phone 7 is released, users will be able to enjoy the fact that the hardware requirements for the phone include an accelerometer. Some applications are naturally inclined to work well with accelerometer input. Imagine a "Labyrinth" style game where you can now just rotate or tilt the device instead of simulating the tilting of the table using some buttons or sliders? Just rotating the device from portrait to landscape can re-flow the screen in the right orientation without the user selecting their preferred orientation."

Windows Phone 7 hardware requires an accelerometer, and I for one am interested in seeing what developers will do with that requirement. Over at The Windows Phone Developer Blog Dave Edson has written a fairly detailed post about the ways the accelerometer API can be used. The post includes code snippets that illustrate key aspects of the API. Now would also be a great time to get started developing an accelerometer-leveraging application – it appears Windows Phone 7 release day is just around the corner. Get coding!

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Are Airships Making A Grand Comeback?

Sir David King, who you know is a big deal because dude’s knighted (and he’s director of the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment at the University of Oxford), sees a different method of freight delivery becoming a reality in the near future: cargo blimps.

While a blimp moves significantly slower than an airplane (currently not going much faster than 75 mph), they could potentially haul more, deliver goods to a wider range of places and do it without leaving a huge carbon footprint.

Where planes rely on fuel and runways, a blimp could take advantage of alternative methods for each. Solar power could keep a blimp in the sky, for instance, and it could be designed to be its own loading dock, so it wouldn’t have to land at any specialized facility. Depending on its size, the floating crafts could also haul twice as much as your average 747 freight plane.

Just how possible is the idea? Sir King thinks it could happen within the next 10 years, and that’s not as crazy as it may sound. “There are an awful lot of people we talk to who say this is going to happen,” said King. “This is something I believe is going to happen.”

We have certainly been writing about more and more zeppelins and blimps lately, and all around the world there’s been an increased interest in the technology, including America’s own Lockheed Martin, which received a grant from the US government.

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Perfect Launch: Private Rocket Gets Perfect Liftoff

SpaceX Falcon 9 launched from Cape Canaveral this afternoon, in a picture-perfect liftoff. The vehicle separation occurred as planned, and shortly after that, the second stage ignited as designed. Beautiful!

In its first attempt at launch earlier today, Falcon 9 remained on its launch pad at Cape Canaveral because of an engine abort with about a second before liftoff. After that happened, SpaceX said the spacecraft put itself into “safe mode.”

A few minutes later, SpaceX reported, “The pad abort involved an out-of-limit startup parameter.” About an hour later, the countdown was resumed, and the powerful two-stage rocket gracefully lifted off the launch pad. At 9 minutes,4 seconds after launch, Falcon 9 achieved Earth orbit.

Via SpaceX

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The Physics Of Space Battles

Joseph Shoer is a Ph.D. candidate in aerospace engineering, studying how modular spacecraft could be assembled, and hoping that they will be the telescopes and human exploration vehicles of the future, and not for crushing the dreams of Martian colonists.

I had a discussion recently with friends about the various depictions of space combat in science fiction movies, TV shows, and books. We have the fighter-plane engagements of Star Wars, the subdued, two-dimensional naval combat in Star Trek, the Newtonian planes of Battlestar Galactica, the staggeringly furious energy exchanges of the combat wasps in Peter Hamilton’s books, and the use of antimatter rocket engines themselves as weapons in other sci-fi. But suppose we get out there, go terraform Mars, and the Martian colonists actually revolt. Or suppose we encounter hostile aliens. How would space combat actually go?

First, let me point out something that Ender’s Game got right and something it got wrong. What it got right is the essentially three-dimensional nature of space combat, and how that would be fundamentally different from land, sea, and air combat. In principle, yes, your enemy could come at you from any direction at all. In practice, though, the Buggers are going to do no such thing. At least, not until someone invents an FTL drive, and we can actually pop our battle fleets into existence anywhere near our enemies. The marauding space fleets are going to be governed by orbit dynamics – not just of their own ships in orbit around planets and suns, but those planets’ orbits. For the same reason that we have Space Shuttle launch delays, we’ll be able to tell exactly what trajectories our enemies could take between planets: the launch window. At any given point in time, there are only so many routes from here to Mars that will leave our imperialist forces enough fuel and energy to put down the colonists’ revolt. So, it would actually make sense to build space defense platforms in certain orbits, to point high-power radar-reflection surveillance satellites at certain empty reaches of space, or even to mine parts of the void. It also means that strategy is not as hopeless when we finally get to the Bugger homeworld: the enemy ships will be concentrated into certain orbits, leaving some avenues of attack guarded and some open. (Of course, once our ships maneuver towards those unguarded orbits, they will be easily observed – and potentially countered.)

Now, Let’s Talk Technology

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